Most of those using the internet are young people, a good number in their early teens with little source of income.
Therefore, just as the buying of airtime, which is dominated by small denomination cards, small data bundles are driving the use of the internet in Kenya.
The data bundles vary from 5 to 50 megabytes (MB), which most people buy as they mirror what happens in the purchasing of other items.
Mobile phones and airtime scratch cards are all made and sold with the low-income consumer in mind.
The companies are selling internet-enabled phones from as low as 10 dollars. Similarly, the value of airtime scratch cards starts from 0.05 dollars.
For data bundles, things are not any different as the mobile phone service providers offer packages starting from 5MB.
The 5MB data bundle goes for an average of 0.05 dollars, for leading telecom Safaricom, followed by 10MB bundle that goes for 0.10 dollars, 30MB at 0.30 dollars and the 130MB goes for 10 dollars.
Rival Airtel, on the other hand, recently introduced 0.20 dollars unlimited internet bundle as it targeted the youth on social networks.
As with other goods, the lower the data bundle, the higher the consumer spends, but this do not bother the Kenyan users.
“I normally buy airtime cards of between 0.20 dollars and 0.49 dollars. Once I buy the cards, I have to balance how I would spend it, so that I use part of the money for data, another for SMSs and the rest for voice,” Silas Musau, a university student in Nairobi, said Sunday.
Spending a good amount of his time on social media networks, sometimes Musau exhausts the seven-day 5MB data bundle in a day.
“When this happens, I buy another. The thing is not how much I save but how I balance my airtime,” he said, capturing the habits of millions of other internet users, in particular the young ones.
Bernard Mwaso, a software developer with Edell IT Solution in Nairobi, noted that selling the small data bundles increases use and access.
“Any product must conform to consumer habits if the manufactures have to sell them. For data bundles, which are products that people can do without, the lower the value the higher the access,” he said, adding that even with the unlimited bundles, the companies have to target the bottom segment of the market by offering low-priced products.
The number of internet/data users in Kenya stands at 31.9 million users with subscriptions hitting 22 million.
Mobile internet subscriptions contribute 99 percent of the total internet, according to Communication Authority of Kenya. Enditem
Source: Xinhua
